Event: Shahrar Ali

Former deputy leader Shahrar Ali on the authoritarian rot at the heart of Zack Polanski’s machine. Two years ago, the Green Party of England and Wales became the first political party in British history to lose a claim for unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. My ordeal escalated in 2021, when I was reappointed as a frontbench spokesperson for policing and justice. My gender-critical views precipitated the passive-aggressive resignation of Siân Berry as co-leader of the party and the escalation of an unrelenting, concerted campaign by gender-identity ideologues to have me removed as spokesperson. Despite the fact I had gone through a competitive selection and appointments process, my detractors sought to reverse engineer a process by which they could justify my removal. They drew up a revised spokespeople’s code of conduct and created a special monitoring panel for which I was the first subject of business. It was truly Kafkaesque stuff. It took the groupthink authoritarians almost another year to have me removed, in 2022. They said I had ‘championed a highly controversial position on trans rights’ that was allegedly incompatible with acting as a spokesperson. I countered that my sensible positions on keeping rapists out of the female prison estate and prohibiting rogue online clinics from dispensing puberty blockers to kids were not just compatible with party policy but required by it, too. As a spokesperson for justice, I was also duty-bound to articulate these positions. I took the party to court for unlawful gender-critical discrimination and won in 2024. Going to court was extraordinarily stressful and required my absolute resolve in the justice of the cause and the support of countless concerned campaigners and donors. I was horrified at the idea that a political association could remove a spokesperson from post for expressing not just a legally…